Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626, incorporated herein by reference.
Lighting fixtures, such as LED-based lighting fixtures, have been implemented that enable groups of light sources in the lighting fixtures to be individually controlled. For example, LED-based lighting fixtures may include a plurality of LED segments, each containing one or more LEDs, that may be individually controlled (e.g., segments that may be individually turned on/off). A controller may be utilized to individually control each of the LED segments. Although such LED-based lighting fixtures enable individualized control of LED segments, the user interface to interact with the controller may have one or more drawbacks. For example, the user interface may not enable control via touch interaction between the user and the lighting fixture. Also, for example, the user interface may not enable use with a lighting fixture that contains flexible and/or adjustable lighting sources, such as a lighting fixture with a flexible and adjustable sheet of LEDs.
Thus, there is a need in the art to provide lighting fixtures with a touch-sensitive light emitting surface that optionally overcomes one or more drawbacks of existing lighting fixtures.